Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny

by Sadhguru

A belief system will not offer you growth; it offers you only solace or entertainment.

For now, you could simply see whatever you call “past life” as unconscious layers of memory in the mind. If you meditate and attain heightened levels of awareness, these unconscious layers of the mind that are ruling you from within could be broken down, dissolved.

Karma Samyama, an advanced spiritual program we do at Isha, is a meditation that brings layers of the unconscious mind to the surface to dissolve them.

Anything that is karmic dissolves only when the discerning mind is in function. If you just leave it unexamined, it hardens into a tendency. These tendencies are working upon you all the time.

In Samyama, no suggestions are given to you; no guidance is given to you. But the process allows layers and layers of the past to surface and work themselves out by moving you to a certain level of intense awareness. You are now free of several impulses and tendencies.

The problem is that when you undergo experiences unconsciously, you do not learn from them. It does not matter how many times it happens: if you keep forgetting, you will repeat the same actions. If it is a conscious experience, however, it will always transform you. In Samyama, you do not work out your karma on the level of memory, but on the level of conscious energy experience.

If you see that your rage and resistance are only because of past influences, they will transform instantly into something positive. It is because you cannot see that your present personality is just a projection of the past that you cling to it.

In experiencing consciously, there is no imprint of karma. Every experience and action becomes liberating. Once you have tasted something consciously, there is no need to keep revisiting it. That aspect of karma is finished.

If conception happened in a certain state of love and joy, it would naturally attract a certain type of life. If it happened in a state of unpleasantness, it would attract another type of life. Of course, this happened in a traditional context when the couple in question was young. Today, no such social arrangement is possible, but couples can still arrange a situation of great pleasantness and energetic aliveness for themselves to ensure that they produce a better next generation.

But, essentially, tendencies drive a child to a particular womb. And because the child comes to you in such a tender state, you have the capability to influence them to a great extent. You can enhance either their pleasantness or their unpleasantness.

With children, the less you try to influence them, the more they are influenced by you. The more you try to influence them, the less successful you will be.

Let’s say your father was a criminal. Now, you have the choice to follow in his footsteps and become one; or if you have the awareness and inteligence, you might exercise the choice to opt for another kind of life. The genes may be the same, the environment may be ridden with crime, but some will still grow beyond it. Once there is a certain distance between you and all that you have gathered, you can make anything of your life. Once there is distance between you and your karma, you are free.

When you’re unconscious, where you go is not your choice. Even a dead leaf goes somewhere, but where? It cannot decide. The wind will decide. Even a little ant knows where exactly it wants to go, but any being that’s become totally unconscious cannot choose. Once you have lost the discerning part of your mind, you have no choice. Whichever way the tendencies push you, that’s where you will go.

Will you use your discernment to make this into the most wonderful life there is? This is the only question that counts.

Don’t even think of unwinding karma in the disembodied state. When you’re unconscious, when you’ve lost your faculties, a minuscule amount of karma may be undone. But that’s not important. It should not even be thought of.

if substantial inner work is done and only a little karma is left! Don’t concern yourself with what happens to you after you die.

you wish to assist others who have died, there are certain dimensions and possibilities of sadhana that I will be opening up in the coming years so we can genuinely do something to help those who are in the disembodied state.

Now what we call mahasamadhi is the reverse: to bring the prana to a certain state of intensity and maturity in the structure so that it cannot be held in the physical form anymore. The reason yogis seek such a death is because it is natural, effortless. If you die with a disease or accident, there is violence in the death. The residual impact of that violence endures in so many ways in the subtle body.

Don’t worry about getting rid of karma. Just concern yourself with how not to acquire new karma. This anxiety—“I want to get rid of my karma”—will itself breed more karma. So don’t get caught up with how to burn it all up. Karma will melt down with the process of life itself; living is itself burning karma.

Karma is not some kind of punishment. It is just information. How you carry your information will determine whether it becomes burdensome, restrictive, painful, joyful, or liberating. It all depends on how you carry it.

Now, how do you not gather karma? As we’ve seen, the simplest thing you can do is to make your involvement absolute, not selective. The air that you breathe, the sound you hear, the ground you sit on—be absolutely involved with all of it. Unbridled involvement is the nature of life itself. The tree standing here is involved with everything—the earth, the water, the breeze, the sky, everything. Life will blossom only if involvement is total. Once you discriminate, karma multiplies big-time.

This is what every human being should aspire to: discrimination only on the level of action, not involvement. Action is necessarily limited. It involves a certain expenditure of energy, time, competence, and other factors. Discretion is necessary only on the level of action; otherwise, you will waste yourself. But involvement is an internal state, and it needs to be all-inclusive.

Ideas based on selectivity—“this is my house,” “this is my work,” “this is my country”—are relevant only on the level...

This is the fundamental reason karma has become a problem. It is because you’re trying to capture life. You cannot own life; you can only live it.

The karmic body represents only a certain amount of information. The rest comes from parents, education, society, cultural environment, and a host of other factors. So it does not mean that the karmic body will always manifest as the same type of human being.

psychologists speak of that aspect of the individual unconscious that is connected with a larger collective unconscious. This is what we mean by collective karma. Because we perform certain actions, karma accumulates. This has individual and collective consequences.

At this moment, if you are willing, the karma of Adiyogi, the first yogi and first guru, can become yours. It has already become ours in so many ways. There are so many things he achieved through his karma that we are making use of today. It has become our karma. You may never have gone through the sadhana he underwent, but you can enjoy the fruits of his karma because it is simply there, available to all.

There has been a great emphasis in the yogic tradition on cultivating the right attitude toward life because, depending on your attitude or quality, you attract that kind of thought, emotion, and experience toward yourself.

Although you are not able to become spiritual by effort, by enhancing your receptivity, you will slowly draw the right thoughts, the right emotions, the right feelings, the right blessings toward you. It will definitely happen.

The moment of death is particularly important in determining the kind of quality you have and the kind of karma you attract. So if you die in anger, in hatred, in misery or in pain, you attract one kind of karma. If you die in peace or blissfulness, you attract another kind of karma.

Every spiritual process is about transforming the animal nature within you. As you move toward a divine possibility, you must take care of your animal nature with the right kind of awareness and inner work. Merely pretending to be moral won’t do. Many human beings who project themselves as very principled and upright find themselves consumed by their animal impulses—whether lust or greed—later in their lives. They completely lose their grip over themselves in their later years. So dissolving the animal nature is the aim of a daily spiritual process.

It is a complex web of chains—some beautiful and studded with exquisite diamonds, some of it just ugly rusted iron shackles. It makes no sense to try to pick the good karma from the bad. This is why spiritual seekers are not interested in acquiring good karma. They just want to drop the entire mess. This means burning up their karma through intense action as well as distancing themselves from it through meditation.

Only when you learn to transform every memory—conscious/unconscious, pleasant/unpleasant, beautiful/horrendous—into joy and wellbeing are you ready.

Traveling the globe can be wonderfully exciting. But at a certain point, one tires of going round in circles. The scenery changes, the weather alters, but there is something deep within a human being that dislikes going in circles. This innate dislike is bound to surface at some time.

With abandon, all the shackles fall away. The final pin is unlocked. Once you take wing, webs and chains and labyrinths have no hold upon you.

Do not think of karma in terms of lifetimes. Think of it in terms of just this Living Moment.